Do You Feel Like an Impostor? Here’s Why…

Do fear you’re going to be found out? Do you worry that all of the accolades you receive professionally and personally are illusions and that if people really knew you, they’d see that you’ve been faking it all along?

Do you feel like you can never do enough or do well enough, no matter how much you do or how well you do?

Do you forget to recognize your successes and your strengths thinking you should have done more?

If you’re a woman you probably said yes to most if not all of these questions.

I’ve been working with women to empower them for a decade and a half and I used to be shocked by the powerful women running million-dollar businesses when they would share with me their fear of being discovered as the fraud they felt like…

Or the woman who came within months of losing her entire multi-million-dollar business because she had lost herself in her boyfriend at the time. He constantly required her to choose him or her business…she kept choosing him only to be shocked, ashamed and confused by the fact that she risked her livelihood for a man that ultimately left her for another woman.

Sound familiar?

I’ll admit, I’ve been this woman. Yearning so deeply to feel loved and validated by the man in my life. Trying to get him to prove to me my worthiness and value by loving me the way I deeply yearned to be loved.

Over the years, doing my heart-centered work and my own personal development work, I have discovered what motivates smart women, successful women to do exactly this.

Many women suffer from the Four Core Wounds.

Until these wounds are healed you will be stuck in people pleasing, saying ‘yes’ when you want to say “no”, proving your worth to others, feeling you can never DO enough, or BE enough and feeling like a fraud.

So many women come to me saying to me in total frustration…”I have been working on myself for so many years! I don’t understand why this (situation) still coming up!”

What breaks my heart the most is that they blame themselves. It’s not their fault. It’s not YOUR fault. It wasn’t my fault either.

The fault falls on the core wounds that women have embodied for millennia. In this article I will discuss the first core wound.

But first a disclaimer: I work with women. I’m intimately aware of how these wounds affect women. I’m not saying that men don’t have these wounds. They may, but how they show up for women is very female and for good reason.

The first core wound is guilt. In general woman carry a lot of guilt and if you’re mother it’s not only accepted that you will feel guilty, but it’s also expected.

Guilt is poison to your mind and body and will eventually manifest as physical pain. I have found that in my work with women diagnosed with fibromyalgia that addressing guilt first is powerfully effective in eliminating their pain and other symptoms.

Women feel guilty because women have become the scapegoats of society. It’s perfectly acceptable to blame women for the ills of the world. I’ll list a few:

we have been blamed for our first born being female,

rape victims have been blamed for being in the wrong place or being dressed inappropriately

mothers are blamed for their children’s behavior or how they turn out as adults

we are blamed for being stay-at-home moms i.e. we’re being lazy or unmotivated/not contributing to the family in an important way

we are blamed for being career women and not being more present and available to our children

we are blamed for being too seductive or being a cold-fish

when a man cheats we blame the wife for not meeting his needs

we blame the mistress for being the homewrecker

We feel responsible for the happiness of others and it’s a heavy cross to bear. Do you recognize the ‘damned if I do, damned if I don’t’ pattern?

The underlying beliefs of the guilt is “my decisions hurt people” and “my gain is their loss”.

Guilt leads to unworthiness. If you feel guilty, you believe that you don’t deserve the raise, the time off or to charge more for your services.

If you believe that your decisions hurt people you are indecisive and/or never choose you or what you want.

If you believe that my gain is their loss you will never ask for you what you want and even when it’s offered to you, you may deny it.

I invite you to become very self-aware over the next 24 hours to discover how often you feel guilty. Just notice how often you thin to yourself or say aloud, “I feel bad”. That is a clue to hidden guilt.